User talk:Pheobechloe

Western Critics About Eileen Chang

During 1950s, Eileen Chang didn’t get much attention of the western scholars. But after the publish of The Rice Sprout Song and The Naked Earth, the western world finally noticed her.

In 1961, Xia Zhiqing（夏志清）first wrote Eileen Chang into modern Chinese literary history.He gave high regards for Chang——"the most excellent writer since the May Fourth", "a must-read" Chinese author of the same caliber as Li Bai and Cao Xueqin, a living Chinese writer comparable to an extremely few first-ranked modern Western authors.He considered The Rice Sprout Song as an masterpiece in modern Chinese literary history, spoke highly of Romance(Chuanqi), and claimed that The Golden Cangue(Jinsuoji) was the greatest long short story in Chinese history.

Xia Zhiqing also pointed out the characteristics of Eileen Chang’s novels: 1.A strong sense of history. 2.Luxuriant imagination. 3.A vivid and mature description of Chinese customs and human emotions 4.Profoundly revealed the nature of the characters 5.Benefited from both western and ancient Chinese literature. Influenced by Freud, Zhang is good at psychological description and metaphors. In terms of the narration styles, she adopted a style of traditional Chinese novels.

About the same time, Eileen Chang gained a reputation in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Especially in Taiwan, many scholars and writers started to comment or even studyed on her works. A case in point is Shuijing(水晶), who was one of the fans of Eileen Chang, and wrote The Art of Eileen Zhang’s Fiction(张爱玲的小说艺术) Meanwhile there were also bad reviews about Eileen Chang. Such as Tang Wenbiao（唐文标). He thought Eileen Chang was no diferent to the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School(鸳鸯蝴蝶派).

What made Eileen Chang stood out of her peers was her sensitive feminine writing. Eileen Chang took up a different path.While most female writers in modern Chinese literary history tried to adopt a “serious” modes ranging from socialist realism to liberal humanist modernsism, in order to be assimilated into the male-dominated mainstream tradition, Eileen Chang choose to deal with a “feminine” genre, dedicating herself to improving this genre in its own terms.

As for the acceptance of Chang's work outside the mainland China, generally her works were appealing to many ethnic Chinese people,but not to western people.There was an argument that Chang's desolated world might be just too alienate to western culture. Eileen Chang’s appearance in North America went through two phases, first in the book market and then in academia, both at the height of the Cold War. Insofar as the Anglophone market is concerned, Eileen Chang encountered a “modest success” with her first English novel, The Rice-Sprout Song (1955), written under the sponsorship of the United States Information Service in Hong Kong, where she temporarily stayed after departing her beloved Shanghai in 1952.19 But her second commissioned “anti-Communist novel,” Naked Earth (1957), published after she had immigrated to the United States in 1955, and“turned out to be a disappointment both for readers and Chang herself.”Despite renewed efforts, her third English novel, The Rouge of the North (1967), was “received coldly,” whereas its Chinese version, Embittered Woman(Yuannü), a rewrite version of The Golden Cangue ,was welcomed with enthusiasm in Hong Kong and Taiwan in the second half of the 1960s, when the authorized republication of her previous works reconsolidated her reputation among Chinese readers and contributed to an extraordinary fandom of her work in the subsequent decades.